Building on the fun, Firefox 32 (released today) will now spin the unicorn when you press the mouse down in the area that unicorn is bouncing.

The really cool thing about the unicorns movement, both bouncing and spinning, and coloring is that this is all completed using pure CSS. There is no Javascript triggering the animation, direction, or events.

The unicorn is shown when the menu’s :empty pseudo-class is true. The direction and speed of the movement is controlled via a CSS animation that moves the unicorn in the X- and Y-direction, with both moving at different speeds. On :hover, the image of the unicorn gets swapped from grayscale to colorful. Finally, :active triggers the spinning.

We shipped the Australis project with Firefox 29, but the Firefox team hasn’t stopped working on making Firefox the easiest browser to personalize. Firefox allows easy customizing through the new Customize mode, and now in Firefox Nightly people will find a quick and easy to way to set the theme of the browser.

After entering Customize mode, a new menu is shown at the footer of the window. Clicking on this menu will show any installed themes as well as a list of five recommended themes.

These recommended themes were picked from the Add-ons for Firefox website by members of the Firefox User Experience team. All of the themes are licensed through Creative Commons. Some are CC-BY and others are CC-BY-SA.

Hovering over a theme in the menu will preview the appearance of the theme. Clicking on one of the themes will change the applied theme.

We haven’t figured out yet what the rotation will be for recommended themes. Any input on how often or how we should go about putting together the next list is greatly appreciated.

I haven’t written up one of these blog posts in a while. The previous one was in August 2012 for Firefox 15. Coincidentally, that post mentioned a subtle change to the site identity area of the web browser.

In today’s release of Firefox, there is another subtle change to the site identity area of the browser. Pages that are a part of Firefox itself, whether it be the built-in home page (about:home), our troubleshooting page (about:support), or others now sport a special Firefox branding within the location bar. The goal of this branding is to increase awareness and trust with these pages.

Clicking on the Firefox name or the two-tone Firefox logo next to the name will show a popup notification that explains that this is a secure Firefox page.

I often find myself in situations where I have multiple tabs that I opened only to look at for short periods of time. Sometimes I reach this state while reading articles on Hacker News or looking at funny pictures on Reddit. At the end of looking at the tabs, it would be nice if Firefox had a way to close these ephemeral tabs so you can get back to your previous work quicker.

Well, Firefox now does! If you open lots of tabs from Reddit and then want to close all of the tabs to the right of Reddit, just right-click on the Reddit tab and choose “Close Tabs to the Right”. It’s easy and quick!

Why “close tabs to the right” and not “close tabs to the left”? When we open new tabs they appear on the end, and so naturally tabs that have a longer lifetime end up being promoted to the start-side of the bar. This leads us towards the situation where closing tabs “to the right” is a simple way of closing the ephemeral tabs.

Users who are using Firefox with a right-to-left locale such as Hebrew or Arabic should see the equivalent “Close Tabs to the Left” feature.

Huge thanks go out to Michael Brennan who contributed the patches and automated tests for this feature! Unless something drastic happens, this feature will find its way to Firefox Release in just over 12 weeks in Firefox 24.

This is the first week of a new semester at Michigan State University, and with that brings a new group of students who will be working on a senior capstone project with Mozilla.

This semester the students will be focusing on multitouch gestures within the browser. They’ll start out the semester by fixing a few good-first-bugs, then they’ll move on to adding some gestures to standalone image and video documents. The final step of the project will be to focus on improving our pinch-to-zoom for webpages in Firefox.

As the semester progresses, the students will be blogging their progress on their own blogs (I may crosspost them here from time to time):

Over the holiday weekend, the cable box in my house stopped working. The user interface for the cable box functioned fine, but the picture and audio were completely gone. I brought the cable box to Comcast and swapped it with one that they had in stock for no charge.

The next day I hooked up the cable box and called Comcast to sync up the box with their licensing service. When I was on the phone with them, the operator mentioned that there was a pending service order in a couple days and they could do the work then if that wasn’t a problem. Weird, nobody here knew anything about this service order.

Somehow there was an order in for telephone and cable service upgrades/installation. The phone number they had on file as requesting this service had nothing to do with us. Googling the phone number got us a name and address of a house in the next city over. It goes without saying that we promptly got the service order cancelled.

In the end, I’m happy that we noticed this before it happened.

Could we be a victim of identity theft? How could an order like this be placed on our account? What would have happened if we hadn’t noticed?

Thanks Tom. These past few days have brought a community and state together for a common cause that will most likely be forgotten about when Midnight Madness comes around.

Often times a coach of a college basketball team has to help his players choose if they should leave college for the pros, and just recently Izzo got to trade places with his students (not for the first time though).

Izzo could have decided to leave East Lansing and move down to Cleveland to coach arguably the best professional basketball player right now. But he didn’t.

As an MSU student and alumni, I am glad that Tom decided to stay at MSU. The basketball program has helped the university tremendously, and much of the thanks go to Mr. Izzo and his family.